


Like Fire Under Water

by fiach_dubh



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: 2016 fallout big bang, 69, Canon level language, Cult dynamics, Cunnilingus, Drinking, F/F, Fahrenheit headcanon because I ignore that Hancock's daughter stuff, Oral Sex, Past Abuse, References to Drugs, Strong Women, Vaginal Fingering, fobb 2016, passes the Bechdel Test, wlw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-24 04:53:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7494636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiach_dubh/pseuds/fiach_dubh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fahrenheit gets the news that Saugus Ironworks is empty, and the Forged that used to live there are all dead, she is faced once again with a past she had left behind. The news leads her to spiral downwards, until Glory suggests taking her old life back.</p><p>On the journey to face old ghosts, Glory and Fahreneheit reveal themselves to each other.</p><p>OK, look. It's a weird, internal journey, all about reclaiming your past and accepting your actions. Plus there's sex in it.</p><p>Part of the 2016 fallout Big Bang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

 

 

Fahrenheit knows Glory, but doesn’t _know_ her. Glory comes through town now and again, on whatever mysterious business she’s sent on, toting a big gun and a fuck-you grin and Fahrenheit would have to be blind to not notice. To not like.

But aside from one or two occasions where they’ve sat at the same table in the Third Rail, sharing a few words with all the weight and importance of a birds farts, they’ve not really crossed paths. To tell the truth, Fahrenheit kinda suspected Glory might have a thing with KLEO. Odd, sure, but there’s odder pairings the Commonwealth over. Just the other month some dude in Diamond city married his Miss Nanny model.

Anyway, that’s always the first place Glory goes when she runs into town. There, The Third Rail, and The Hotel Rexford if she’s gonna be there more than a day or two. Always in that order.

And it’s not like Fahrenheit watches out for her or anything it’s just that. Glory stands out. In the sea of tired old faces and slumped shoulders, she stands tall and proud, and her hair catches all the light there is to catch. Her name suits her.

But that’s all it’s ever going to be. A noticing, a liking, and maybe sometimes at night, fingers deep in her own slickness, fantasising about white hair and dark skin above her. It’s not a tragedy if they never come to pass. There’ll be others in the future, and there were others in the past. It’s just nice to think and wonder.

And it could go on like this, an undone thing, an unfulfilled want, til the world ended all over again. But things change, it’s the nature of them.

Cause one day, a not-special day, grey and damp and chilly, Fahrenheit is listening to the radio. Hancock is tripping out on the sofa, dragging his hands in the air above his head, not in any fit state to talk, so it’s the radio keeps her company while she darns a tear in a shirt.

The Diamond City radio DJ, that Travis dude. She likes him. Liked him more when he was shy and clumsy and stammering, but he’s still good. He leads into his news segment, and all smooth and half-amused, like he isn’t shattering her apart, and tells her that Saugus Ironworks has been hit.

“Those crazy raiders there, called themselves The Forged, went and pissed off the wrong Vault Dweller. I have it on good authority that the whole place is empty now. Any survivors would be wise to pretend to be from literally anywhere else. I’m sure the citizens of The Slog are praising their good fortune.”

He segues into a song, some bouncy pre-war thing she’s heard uncountable times, and she doesn’t hear it at all. Saugus is gone. The Forged are broken. Slag, who sometimes still looms, laughing, in her dreams, is dead.

She raises one hand to the burn scar on her face, half-conscious. Her other hand, holding the needle and thread, twitches, letting them fall to the floor.  
Dead and gone, dead and gone.

It’s impossible. Her mind had them as untouchable, as a thing that would always be there, lurking, waiting to drag her back and burn her alive. She had carried them with her like the burn scars they gave.

And even after all this time, this anger and shame, it knocks her back hard. Leaves her feeling unreal and untethered, like she’s slipped from a world where she’s a woman who exists and can touch things, into one where her hand slips through walls. It doesn’t, of course, but whenever she reaches out to touch something, there’s an instant where she thinks it will.

She’s a ghost. She’s dead. She died long ago, gave spirit and soul and obedience to The Forge. They gave her a new name, a life that she ran from, and if the people who made her are dead, she can’t possibly be living.

Saugus Ironworks lies empty, Slag is dead. A God she once worshiped is silent, sleeping, unrevered. She spends nights shaking and remembering and not sleeping.

She drinks at The Third Rail, too much, too fast. Gets mean with it, says things she regrets to her few friends. When Magnolia offers kindness, Fahrenheit sneers. When Hancock tries to talk, she spits poison. Everyone can see her falling apart, the cracks showing the rot within, and she wants to scream.

Until one night, already half-way to drunk, sitting alone and avoided, she looks at the door just as Glory saunters in. She sinks inside herself, because the last thing she wants is pity from the woman she fantasises about. It might just kill her.

Glory walks past with just a glance at her, her table littered with empty bottles, and she frowns. She heads over to Whitechapel Charlie, talks for a while in a voice too low to hear over Magnolia’s smokey singing.

Fahrenheit is more than ready to be alone, more than ready to be rejected and ignored. But Glory sits down at the table with her.

She casts a look at the empty bottles, tilts her head.

“Fuck,” says Fahrenheit, voice thick and heavy on her tongue. “Fuck off. Don’t need pity.”

“Good thing you’re not gonna get it, then.”

Fahrenheit looks up at Glory. In the dim bar her hair and skin seem to glow. Light gleaming off her. She’s beautiful. Beautiful like a radstorm, not like some prewar picture.

And there’s not an ounce of pity in her.

Maybe that’s what makes her talk. Maybe it’s that she feels empty, mapless, lost, and Glory showed her a path.

It comes out like this, in fractured words spat out like bad meat, a simple truth.

“I used to be a raider.”

And Glory just looks into her eyes and nods.

“No offense, Fahrenheit, but pretty much anyone looks at you can tell that.”

Fahreneheit waves a hand, irritated. “Well, that’s just fucking great. Do all that work to get away from it and strangers can tell it from looking.” She takes a deep drink from her bottle. “I used to run with the Forged. You know the Forged?”

“I know of them. Never had a run in myself. Heard they like fire.”

Fahrenheit laughs, except it’s hollow and bitter. Tastes like ashes in her mouth. “Yeah, they like fire. They gave me this scar,” she says, tapping at it. “Lived in some old metalworking plant. Thought the forge there was some kind of – awful God.” She remembers the white-yellow glow of it, the sick, burning joy that came of being chosen. “They fed people to it. Alive. The way they screamed...”

Fahrenheit is looking down at her hands, at the short and dirty nails, at the scars and callouses there, at the table beneath them. She shakes her head.

“And you’ll never have a run-in with them now,” she says. Which is good, so good, because the thought of Glory’s skin all burned up makes her feel sick. “Cause they’re dead. Good thing I decided I’d had enough and ran, isn’t it?”

Glory whistles, low and interested. “Who on earth managed that?”

“That. That Vaultie. Fucking everywhere now, isn’t she. All over the radio. Doing shit like that.”

“Yeah, she is everywhere,” and there’s something to the tone of that, something knowing and privately amused that makes her look her up. But Glory’s face doesn’t show any of that. She’s leaning over the table, chin resting on the back of her hands. Her gaze is steady on Fahrenheit’s face.

“So, she killed the people who hurt you. Plenty out there would be glad.”

And this is what breaks it open. Because – “Plenty might be, but I’m not.”

“Why?”

“Cause that was mine to do! If anyone was gonna kill them for all the awful shit they pulled, it oughta have been someone who knew them, lived among them.” She doesn’t say ‘loved them’. It’s a shameful admission. “They were all I had for years, and I had a life there that I just left behind, along with the few stupid little bits of shit from before them that they didn’t burn, and it was mine to destroy.”

She slumps back in her chair. “I wanted to feed Slag to his own fucking God, see the look on his face. Never get to do that now, will I?”

Glory shifts in her chair, runs one hand through that white, white hair. “You had to leave your stuff behind?”

Of all the things to cling onto in her wordspill, that’s an odd one.

“It wasn’t much,” says Fahrenheit. “Nothing huge. Just a few holdovers from before I got tangled up with them.”

“Still. It’s hard, to leave shit behind.”

And they share a look filled with the same heavy knowledge.

“I couldn’t risk it. What if they caught me? They’d have burned me alive in that forge,” she whispers. “I saw them do it to others.”

“Shit, Fahrenheit. You were right to run.”

Fahrenheit knows that, but hearing it is something else.

She drains her drink. The world has started to get confused around her. She’s quite drunk.

“I want what I left there back.” She’s talking about that tin box in the rafters, but maybe Glory sees something else.

“Then do it.”

Fahrenheit looks up and Glory’s face is – oh. Oh. Glorious. She’d giggle at her own pun if she weren’t so stunned at the way Glory shines right now, with righteous fury and –

 “Yeah,” she says, caught up in it, in that sunrise gleam, tugging at her scarred heart, making it light and new again. “I should,” she says.

“In fact, Saugus is up near the Slog, right? I got business in that direction. I’ll go with. If you want.”

All Fahrenheit can manage is ‘what?”

And suddenly all of Glory’s shining has been shuttered off, put away and she hurts for the lack of it. “If you don’t want me to, that’s fine. I just thought –“

“No, no. I want.” So much, the giddy part of her offers. I want so much. “I’d – I’d like if you came with me.”

Glory nods, like this is a decision that matters, matters to her.

“I’ll be needing to head out tomorrow,” says Glory. “I’ll come by in the morning, pick you up. Can Hancock manage without you that long?”

“Hm? Oh, sure,” Fahrenheit waves a lazy hand in the air. “He can look after himself. He mainly keeps me around cause I look scary.”

Glory laughs. “Only in a good way,” she says.

That one doesn’t hit until Fahrenheit is already crawling onto a mattress, half asleep.

Oh shit, she thinks. Was Glory flirting?

*

She’s all but forgotten come morning, waking with a heavy head and eyes that hurt in the light. She’s thinking about a quiet day, maybe drifting away on some Med-X until the hangover has passed, when Hancock stumbles up to her.

“That scary Glory chick is here, asking for you.”

And it’s all coming back now. “Oh shit,” she says. “I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

She looks up at him. “Glory wants to take me on a trip. To deal with the thing’s been making me such a useless bitch.”

He gives her a look that makes her want to punch him, because her little crush may be fucking obvious but he doesn’t need to be a dick about it.

“A trip, huh,”

“Not one of your kinds of trip,” she says, meaner than she intends.

He raises what, long ago, might have been a reasonably attractive eyebrow

“How long’s that been planned?”

“Since last night.” She gets up, grabs a bag and starts shoving stuff in it, almost blind. Spare undies, she’ll need them. A second shirt. A few bottles of water, some stims. Not the most organised go-bag in the world, but it’ll have to do. She hasn’t got time for proper packing.

“Pleasure trip?” Hancock says, rolling the r.

“None of your business.” Before she leaves, though, she stops and says “Take care of yourself.”

His ruined face, startled into smiles. “Hey,” he says. “Of course I will.”

*


	2. 2

Glory moves smooth and fast, no wasted movement, no ankle turns or casual stumbles, her feet certain and sure even on treacherous ground. The day is bright, and the light breaks over her hair, her cheekbones, the full dark shape of her mouth. She doesn’t smile.

She doesn’t smile, Fahrenheit thinks, because Fahrenheit is fucking up.

She’s not doing so well. Hungover, hungry, other words beginning with h. The rubble in the roads trips her, splinters her stride into pieces. Once, twice. Something that used to maybe once be a set of stairs is what tips her to the ground in the end. Catches her toe on the once-railings and pitches forward, like she never really learned how to walk. Hits the floor hard.

“Fuck!” she shouts, temper fraying.

And Glory is there beside her, helping her up.

“Hey, you hurt?”

Fahrenheit tests her weight on her leg. There’s a little pain, but it’s not bone or muscle deep, it’s all on the surface of skin. Her pant leg is torn, and she rolls it up to see an ugly scrape, where something shredded its way through thick, sturdy cloth. It’s not deep though, blood already drying, skin beneath likely already knitting together. It won’t even scar. She’s had worse.

“Long as I can get this clean soonish, I should be fine.”

No point forgetting the danger of infection. She’s seen people go from a little cut on their hand or somewhere, a cut that turns to poison. Makes the skin around it rot and fall off, or makes the jaw lock tight so food and water can’t get past. Horrible way to go. 

“Come here.”

Glory takes Fahrenheit’s hand, and leads her a little way to a bench in front of the water. The sun comes down at an angle above them, the light breaking apart and shattering over the waves. The air smells bright and sharp. Everything seems very clear, very present. She is here, clean air in her lungs, blood on her leg, dirt under her fingernails.

Glory crouches beside her. She runs her pretty fingers over the scrape, and they brush uninjured, whole skin and Fahrenheit –

Well, fuck. She’s got it worse than she thought. 

Glory opens up a bottle of water, grabs a clean looking rag from, somewhere, and wets it. All Fahrenheit can do is look down as Glory slowly, gently, cleans the gravel and dirt out from the graze. It stings a little, but it’s a sweet and wholesome pain.

“You don’t have to,” she says. “I could have done that myself. I’m not a child.”

Glory looks up at her, and oh, her eyes in the bright sunlight. Dark, yes, but that’s too simple. Dark and golden, dark and warm, dark like the warm safe spaces of the world. 

“I know you’re not,” Glory says. “But I got a better angle here.”

Fahrenheit goes to say something, and her stomach decides to humiliate her utterly by snarling loud enough that she thinks the sudden, startled wailing of gulls might be because of it.

“Sorry,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I fell.” Offering it like a treasure, take this, take this excuse, take it and don’t judge me too harsh.

Glory stands up. “Sorry?” she says. She pushes at her hair, tugs at it a little. “Sorry? Shit, I should be sorry. I can’t believe I forgot –“

She drags her bag open, rummages through with quick, jerky movements. “I even brought stuff to eat, and I just forgot –“

“Hey,” says Fahrenheit, slow. She dares to put her own bony white hand onto Glory’s. “People forget shit sometimes. You travel alone, mostly.”

Glory ducks her head, rummages slower til she find something in the pack. “Hope you like snack cakes.”

“Love ‘em.”

Glory grins. “Me too. Could happily eat them every minute of every day of my life.”

The sun shines down on them, and it warms the back of Fahrenheit’s neck, and she knows she will burn or freckle or both. They sit on the bench, looking over the glittering water, over to the ruins on the other side of the bank. She lets the snack cake sit on her tongue, the oddly bland sweetness of the filling, the dry cake. 

“You know Daisy?” she offers. 

Glory nods. “I know her.” She licks filling off her fingers, quick, efficient.

“You’d never believe it, but she bakes a mean sweetroll.”

Glory tilts her head, considering. In the far distance there is an echoey burst of gunfire. Some private tragedy or success, already passed.

“I’d have to try it,” says Glory, “Decide for myself if her sweetrolls were good. I’m very fussy.”

Fahrenheit presses a hand between her own breasts, against her beating heart, in mock offense. “You don’t trust me on this? On snacks?” She shakes her head.  
And Glory smiles, wide and unrestrained.

*

When they’re done eating, they carry on. Crossing the bridge that isn’t broken, walking with cautious steps through the remnants of Boston, sharp ears and eyes tuned for raiders, supermutants, ghouls. The world, as it is, is dangerous. One wrong step, on moment of bad luck, can mean an ending. But Fahrenheit and Glory are dangerous, too.

“Badass women with big guns,” Glory says at one point, standing in a shaft of dusty sunlight “They should be scared of us.”

They should. They are. They have been.

Glory is looking at walls with a frown of concentration. She sees something, the right thing, and stops. “you – We’ll need to eat lunch, or something. There’s a trader round here. A friend. Trustworthy. She’ll sell us some kind of food and drink at a good price.”

Glory leads Fahrenheit down an alley, an anonymous place that could be anywhere, anyplace at all, and all of a surprise there is a turret there, sat neat and threatening on the metal stairs, pointed out of the alleyway. Quietly chugging away, waiting for enemies, for violence.

“Don’t worry,” Glory says. “Don’t worry.” Her hand on Fahrenheit’s shoulder for a warm, aching second. 

(She feels the touch for hours later. Runs her fingers over it when she thinks Glory isn’t looking.)

The ‘friend, trustworthy’ turns out to be a junk trader called Opal, a woman who has time and hard living etched into her face and a sardonic smile. She directs a knowing look at Fahrenheit’s burn scars. Like she’s thinking ‘I know what you were.’ 

Fahrenheit reaches to her face, unthinking, traces fingertips over the rough texture of it. It’s hard, to wear her history on her face this way.

“What you got food-wise, Opal? Friend here needs some lunch. And all we’ve had today is snack cakes.”

“Friend, huh?” says Opal, leaning over and resting her elbows on a bit of wood. Behind it is a sleeping bag, a box holding no-doubt personal items, not for sale. A bottle of half-drunk Nuka cola sits on the wood, next to Opal.

“Friend,” says Glory. She crosses her arms, and the smile drops from her face. “She doesn’t work with me, though.” An oblique sort of warning, if warning it is.

“I would,” says Fahrenheit, surprising herself. She doesn’t know where that came from. It’s true, though she hadn’t known it was true til it came spilling out of her mouth unbidden. “I would, if it weren’t for Hancock. I already got a job.”

Glory is blinking at her, lovely eyes all stripped bare, and she recovers and says “Yeah, Hancock’s way too much of a handful for you to have a second job as... a courier, like me.”

Opal snorts. “Anyway,” she says “When you two are done flirting, yeah. I got some food. Uh – some crisps in those tube things, and a nice girl I know just dropped off some good Brahmin jerky this morning. I swear by that stuff, really keeps you going. Some purified water too.”

“Uh, sure. Whatever – whatever you like, Fahrenheit,” says Glory and she’s – is she – she is! She’s blushing, going a beautiful deep red under her skin. Blushing, because Opal said –

Fahrenheit is sure she’s blushing too, only on her it’ll be showing as pink and white blotching over her cheeks, her ears, the back of her neck. 

“Jerky is good,” she says, for something to say. “Jerky is really good. And um. Some of the water. And do you have any, like, Dandy Boy Apples? I like those.”

Opal shrugs. “One box.”

Fahrenheit nods. “Sure. How much is that? I mean –“

“Oh, no, I’ll pay. It’s my fault I forgot to pack-“

And they’re looking at each other, so close now, both fighting into pockets for the 30 or 40 caps or whatever it’s gonna cost, and Glory’s mouth is so close they are breathing the same air.

Opal breaks it, that coiling tension between them, breaks it with a laugh and “I don’t care who pays as long as someone does before the world ends again.”

Glory ducks her head, and pays the lady, and they split their new food between their bags. Water, and jerky, and two hundred year old dried apple crisps.

Fuck, thinks Fahrenheit, how am I making such a big deal of this. It’s nothing. Glory is just – kind. Anyone would blush, if someone said those things. Anyone would be awkward in this situation. It’s been a long time since she could raise the blood in someone, and even back then, she was never a beauty.

Glory is kind and probably regretting this already.

That’s all.

She’s thinking on that when they leave, repeating it to her own stupid heart over and over. She feels – she’d say like a kid with a crush, only she never felt like this even when she was young. Too scared, too alone, too angry. Emotions came to her with the suddenness of a bullet to the head, and all the pleasure of the same.  
She still felt like that, wild and untamed, but never before – never before – this fierce and tender thing, this wildflower growing in the ash-choked soil of her body.

A fizzing bubbling thing like fresh Nuka Cola, heady-sweet and energising. Like her whole body was crackling where the air touched it, like anyone who looked at her could see her gleaming, neon-bright, from inside.

And it was time to shut it down. Time to stop it cold. Because god, if she felt so good and hopeful from a smile and a blush and a kind gesture, how much would it shatter her when it turned out Glory never meant any of it in the way Fahrenheit hoped.

And so they keep on walking, through the long-dead skeleton of the city, until buildings thin out and wasteland rises ahead, and the sun gets lower and golder. Eventually Glory stops, rests her hands on her sturdy hips. 

“We’re not too far out,” she says, “But we made slower progress than I’d planned for.”

Fahrenheit grimaces. “Sorry. I know you got important shit – I know your stuff matters.” People could die if Glory doesn’t make it, she knows that. Abstract people with faces she can’t imagine, but it doesn’t make them less real.

Glory speaks very slow. “Yeah, it does. But a fuck-up in my time-planning isn’t your fault. Shoulda figured you’d move slower than me. Not your fault.”

She looks over her shoulder.

“And you can stop with that. No-one’s gonna die if I get there a day or so later. There’s some time built into these things. Sooner is always better, but right now I think the big bad is looking elsewhere.” She smiles, a bright flash in the gathering dusk.

“You wanna keep going through the night?” asks Fahrenheit. “I’ve done that sorta thing before.”

“I bet you have,” low and slow and slipping sweetly, like a sly hand into your pants, but Glory’s face is still and not giving away a single little thing. The light, dim and still, catches on the line of her nose, the edge of her lips. A breeze lifts some of her hair, gone fluffy and curling over the day. 

“I bet you have,” she says again, but there’s none of that tone in it now. “But I already – hm. I’m not gonna have you making yourself sick with lack of sleep. Hancock’d probably stab me.”

“One night won’t kill me, Glory,”

Glory looks away, into the far distance, and her face is – sad. Fahrenheit’s never seen her looking sad before. She doesn’t think of Glory as sad. Grinning, smirking, confidence and violence and fierce wild glee all wrapped up tight, that’s the Glory in her head.

She’s learning some things today, for sure.

“You never know what’ll kill you,” she says. “And what if we go all night and there’s yao guai, or a deathclaw, and you can’t see clear and you’re too tired to be good in a fight. If you died while I was with you, I’d never –“

“Hey,” says Fahrenheit, because she can’t think of anything else to say. “Hey, that’s not. You don’t.”

“We’re looking out for each other on this run, alright? Or there’s no point.” She dusts her hands together, slaps them against her thighs. “No point,” she spits out again.

“Alright,” says Fahrenheit. “If it means so much to you.”

“That you get what you want and get home safe and alive? Yeah, it means something.”

“Alright,” she says again, and Glory is looking over her shoulder again. She’s a star, a sun, a nuclear explosion. Dr Amari once told Fahrenheit they were all the same thing, and right now, looking at Glory, she can believe it.

“I guess we find somewhere to rest up, then,” she says.

Glory nods once, and strikes off again, clearly expecting some kind of tagging after. Fahrenheit isn’t typically the tagging after sort, but hey. Glory looks like she knows where she’s going.

Apparently she’s heading for some kind of house, all boarded up and looking threatening with the sun behind it and the empty windows glaring out, dead-eyed and desperate.

She winks once, at Glory, before doing something with the door, which turns out to not be boarded after all but just look that way.

“it should be fine inside. And safe enough.”

“What is this place?”

“Used to be something, isn’t anything now. Which is why you’re here. I trust you fine, but’d never put you somewhere we still used.”

Yeah. The Railroad. Can’t be Hancock’s bodyguard and a major player in Goodneighbor without knowing them or their works. 

“I’d not tell anyone,”

“Yeah,” says Glory. “Not on purpose. But the rules are there for a reason.”

Inside it’s pretty sad looking. It definitely hasn’t been used for a long time, maybe years, and if Glory remembers when this place was in use she might be a few years older than she looks. The dust is thick, the chairs sagged down into springs and ragged cloth, and there’s two mattresses right on the floor.

Glory lights no lights, which is probably another railroad paranoia thing.

“How much sleep do – do you normally –“

“Lately? Not much.”

Glory makes a frustrated noise. “What I mean is – oh. Fuck it. Just. Go to sleep when you want. I’ll wake you in the morning.”

Fahrenheit opens up some of the new jerky, pauses with a piece half way to her mouth. “Nuh-uh,” she says. “I’m not some fragile Diamond City posh fuck. Did you miss the whole ‘used to be a raider’ thing? I can take my fair watch.”

“I need a lot less sleep than you –“

Fahrenheit shuffles over to Glory on her butt, til she’s close enough to see her in the dusty darkness. 

“You can’t pull the whole ‘going without sleep is dangerous’ shit on me then claim you don’t need it too. Stop treating me like some kind of kid. Fuck, I’ve not been as useless as you seem to think I am since I was seven.”

Glory’s head turns, and her voice is high. “I don’t think you’re useless, I just –“ she pauses. In the dim, her eyes glitter like glass. Her mouth is open like words want to spill out, like something important needs to be said, laid out between them.

But she shakes her head instead and says “Fine. But I’ll take first watch, and wake you late. I really do need less than you.”

“Sure,” says Fahrenheit, feeling sour and turned-about. “Fucking fine.” And she shuffles back to where the mattresses are, hauls herself, fully clothed, onto one of them. Not to sleep, just to sulk. It’s hard for her, to navigate this odd weighty hurt, when she doesn’t even know where it really comes from, when for so long anything she felt was turned to blood and death, or to silence and grinding teeth in the night.

She eats her jerky, drinks down one of the bottles of water, all in sullen silence. From where Glory is, there’s the tell-tale crinkling of snack cake packets. One, two, three. She really goes through them.

Fahrenheit rolls over to face where she thinks Glory is, in the darkness.

“Why’d you even come with me?” and despite how hard she tries, she can’t make it sound easy, casual. It sounds like what it is, an accusation. Might as well go all the way, then. “If I’m such a burden to the way you normally travel.”

A short sigh that could mean anything. 

“Fahrenheit,” says Glory. “No.”

Fahrenheit waits, twisting the fabric of her shirt around and around her index finger

“I –“

Another sigh. 

“I thought it’d be better. I normally go alone and it – sure, I can move as fast as I want –“

Fahrenheit snorts, short and wounded.

“But it’s. It’s. I thought. It might be good, to have someone with me. Cause, together, you and me, we – we look like mercs, right? It makes me less obvious.”

“Right.”

“And. Obvious gets me and a lot of scared and hurt people killed. So. I thought. When you said. We could both get what we wanted. A good thing. And you’re not slow, or useless and a burden and I – “

“It’s alright. I’m being a stupid, fragile fucking baby. I should know better by now.”

Fuck, Glory must move so quick and sure and silent because suddenly there’s a warm hand on her own and the dim lines of Glory’s face close to hers.

“No,” says Glory, low and angry. “No. Don’t you ever say that again. You are amazing. It’s me. I forget that other people need this shit more, is all.”

You are amazing.

You are amazing. 

Glory twitches her hand under Glory’s. “Still,” she says. “Sorry for being so fucking needy. You’d think they’d have burned that out of me at Saugus.”

“People need shit,” says Glory “And that’s ok. And amazing women like you, like me? We need shit too. You got a right to expect people to treat you well. And I’ve been –“

“Hey,” says Fahrenheit “We’ve been jostling each other is all. You got your way of doing things, I got mine, and sometimes they’ll clash. We do this again, I’m sure we’ll figure it out fine.”

She’d like to do this again, only without Saugus at the end of it. Like to go on an adventure with Glory, just for the fun of it.

What she’d like has no place or chance in the world that is, though.

She yawns, sleepy, legs heavy and dull from all the walking, heart beating, beating, confused at its own tenderness beneath scar tissue. 

Glory keeps her hand on Fahrenheit’s as Fahrenheit eventually drops into sleep, and then for a long while after.


	3. 3

She wakes in the early hours of the morning, Glory shaking her by the shoulder, when the light creeping through the cracks in the boards is pale and colourless.

“You insisted,” says Glory to her grumbling. “On your fair share of the watch.”

She sets an old alarm clock by Fahrenheit’s hip. The soft ticking says it’s powered, has batteries. Glory taps the face twice. It reads 4:30, presumably in the morning.

“Wake me in three hours, and we’ll get a good start on the day. Should make Saugus by lunch.”

So close. Yesterday it had seemed sorta distant. In her future, in her past, not ever to be part of her present. Her old haunts, her old crimes, sitting shadowed and bloated on some distant and unreachable horizon.

But they’ll reach it by lunch.

She wants to run. She ran once, twice, a dozen times, always from a bad thing to a worse thing. Was lucky, that the last time running brought her to Goodneighbor, to Hancock, to a home and a friend and people who don’t always spit when they look at her.

She wants to run. But then she looks over at Glory, at where Glory is curling up onto the filthy mattress, at the hair falling about her face, and the soft shadow of her eyelashes on her skin, at the way she is so real and present and solid in this half-unreal light. She thinks of getting up, and walking out silent, walking home alone, and the way Glory will avoid her eyes when they come across each other again. She thinks of that, and she thinks of the difference between running from what’ll kill you and running from what might just help you.

So she clenches her fists, and lets her heart hammer hard in her chest, and bites her lip til she tastes blood, and she stays still. While the sun brightens, sharpens, turns yellow-white, while the clock ticks, ticks, ticks onwards. And she doesn’t run.

It’s not the first time that she’s avoided running, it’s just the first time the choice seems so important.

When the clock hand finally ticks past the agreed time she sighs long and deep and tired, because it’s too late, and it’s a relief. She wakes Glory, whose rising is immediate and without struggle, and they breakfast together in almost-silence before walking out of the house, into the tender new day.

*

It gets hot fast, and before too long Fahrenheit is sweating, damp and uncomfortable underneath her clothes. Greasy-soggy under her tits, in the crack of her ass. Itching in places a polite girl doesn’t scratch, but that she does. Keeps thinking she catches her own stink blowing back on her in the breeze. She’s spoiled now, knows what it is to be clean, that’s the problem. In her Saugus days she might not wash for days, weeks. They all reeked there, it was part of the whole thing.

She’d had actual honest-to-fuck skin infections when she rocked up in Goodneighbor, that Dr Amari had to treat with all kinds of creams and pills before they went away.

Glory seems not to be suffering at all. Sure, actual droplets of sweat are working their way down forehead, neck, but she doesn’t look like she even knows what it’s like to have your underboobs turn into a fucking swamp, how sore the skin gets there.

If it were cooler, Fahrenheit might spare the time to resent this. As it is, she knows very well what she’s doing. Distracting herself with pointless shit. But it’s working, so after she acknowledges it in the privacy of her own head she moves on to thinking about everything and anything other than what’s waiting for her.

Like the flowers. The weeds growing at her feet, with their lumpen shapes and double, sometimes triple flower heads. Bright, brave, ragged things, setting out their flags in brown grass and evil-thorned brambles. She doesn’t know their names, only that they are colourful, and that once as a child she picked some yellow ones and made another child a crown. She doesn’t know the child’s name, either. It’s gone, vanished, burned away by the fire.

They’re on the old road now, working their way past 200 year old roadblocks and car crashes. There’s signs of recent fighting here. Some robots lying strewn about in pieces, the rotting bodies of dead animals.

“Huh,” says Glory, “I know this work.”

“One of yours?”

“Sort of,” she says, keeping mouth and secrets tight and close. “Rogue variable,” she says, and laughs at some private joke. 

They keep going, and Fahrenheit’s feet are so heavy now. She knows this road, this path. They’re so close. Only last time she was going the other way, in the dark, as fast as her feet could take her. She’d made it, fuck, half the night before she felt safe enough to stop running and breathe again. The fire burning at her back.

She can’t stop herself from talking now, though it’s nonsense, falling out of her in broken pieces. Scraps of memory, of the people she knew.

“There was a girl with the Forged,” she says, and why does she even remember it? It didn’t matter. “I didn’t love her and she didn’t love me. But fuck was she good in the sack.”

So easy to turn these secret bruises and cuts into single sentences.

Kissing this girl, kissing Volcano in a secret corner of the old iron works, tongues slick against each other, a rough hand down Fahrenheit’s pants and rubbing at her just this far into pain. They were a family, at Saugus, but they weren’t the kind that offered warm and loving arms. Just the killing embrace of the fire. If you doubted, if you failed, you weren’t worthy. You cut each other down to set yourselves above.

Volcano failed on a raid one too many times, was given to the Forge. Fahrenheit watched as she died. Hadn’t loved her, didn’t much like her, but felt wrong about it all the same.

“It’d sound good,” she was saying, on this road, on this road that led her to her once-home, “If I said that’s why I left. Because they killed the girl I was fucking. But it was months after that.”

Spill it out, vomit it up, open a vein and let it bleed. Everything. Every shade of rot and filth. Every bit of the ash left from all the burning. The deaths and torments done by her, done while she watched and never said a word. Let them be here, let them be true. Let them be witnessed and known and understood.

Let Glory see and let her judge.

Shaking, shaking, and they’re there. She can see it on the horizon, dark against the sky. Won’t take more than fifteen minutes, now.

“I was alone, I was alone for so long. People tried to hurt me, over and over, and I ran til I found a place I could hurt them back. I liked it. I liked hurting them. Made me feel good, until it didn’t anymore. I’m not good, you understand? I’m not good.”

Doesn’t know what she wants from this, except that saying it matters. She’d like Glory to look at her and tell her she is absolved, she’d like more for Glory to shoot her in the head.

“Fuck, Glory. Glory. We killed people, Glory. Innocent people who just wanted to fucking farm or trade in peace and we killed them and they died hard.”

“Yeah,” says Glory. “You did. What are you gonna do about it?”

Not once has anyone ever asked her that. Not once.

“I can’t go back and undo it,” she says, “There’s nothing in the world that’d allow me.”

“Yep. So what are you gonna do about it now?”

Fahrenheit looks down at her hands, pale and freckled and scarred and trembling.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I want to be better, if I can. I want people like me to not happen to any other farmers.”

“That’s a start. That’s a good place to move on from. Shall we?”

A new idea, that she could do that. She could be that. 

They’re standing outside the gates. Outside the entrance, once choked with cars. Someone blew the cars up. There are no bodies, but there are marks. Old blood, gone brown, teeming with flies that glisten green-blue-black. 

She feels sick. 

“Yeah,” she says. “We should. “ But she doesn’t move a single step.

Glory takes her hand.

“I know about the things you do when you don’t even know you’re trapped yet,” says Glory. “These shitbags still have parts of you. It’s time to take them back.”

“I know,” Fahrenheit says. “I just. You keep on. You keep moving. You did what you said. Go on to your job.”

She makes some kind of desperate eye contact with Glory, who is shaking her head.

“Nope,” she says. “If you don’t want me to come in with you, fine, but I’ll be right here. Got a feeling no-one really wants to be alone after something like this.”

Fahrenheit nods. Her head is chaos. Her heart beats, and beats, and beats.

“It should be me,” she says. “Just me.”

So it’s her and her alone who takes those steps into the Ironworks.

*

The carnage must have been monstrous. The mess sure is. Any survivors have gone, scattered to new raider groups, or – perhaps a vain hope – to new, better existences. The dead have been taken away, at least where the... pieces... were big enough. Some weren’t, and they still lay there, a good way along the rotting process. 

The sorta person who could do this – she finds the idea frightening. Pictures a woman, big, muscled, a far-away look in her eyes. Almost imagines her with filed-down, sharpened teeth, then laughs at herself. Her laughter bounces off walls, steel beams, comes back sounding strange and mocking.

Once, Saugus was filled with noise, with people. People she knew, laughed with, ate with. They may have been monsters – and, oh, they were, monsters every one of them – but they were people too. She remembered all their names. The new ones, at least, that they’d been given when they passed the trials.

She’s trembling under the silent roof, tracing fingers along cold rough walls. Sometimes she finds a bloodstain, or some tiny remnant of humanity left behind. Sometimes that’s a card game, left half way through, sometimes it’s a hand or foot, rotting away ignored. The card game bothers her more than the parts.

Every corner she turns she expects to walk into someone she knew, holding a flamer up to burn her to death, finally, at last. 

She scratches at her face, at the burn scar. Feels the ones on her body like they’re fresh and new. Memories coming with every step, and not all of them bad.  
Not all of them bad, no, but under them the awful rotting bleeding truth of it, that she was desperate, yearning, wanting. That she gave her name and past to the Forge and died then and there, that she became Fahrenheit.

Who was she, to keep that name? The fire had given it to her, and she had rejected the fire. She of all people should know how much power a name had. Hadn’t she been told, every day of her brief childhood, that if you name something you make it?

Brief childhood. That’s what she’s here for. For the scraps of it that she couldn’t let burn, even when that was her answer to everything.

She’s nearly there, one foot in front of the other on the rickety walkways. Ember died because he got drunk and fell off, cracked his head open on the floor below, so you gotta be careful, Fahrenheit, because what a fucking disappointment Ember was. Too weak to handle his liquor. Only the weak fail and die like that. At all. She is the favourite, she is beloved, she is special and stronger than every pathetic settler who cowers when they come, laughing with the joy of the flames.

She never fails. Except she does, in the end, doesn’t she.

“I’m not weak,” she says to herself. “It’s not weakness to run from monsters.”

Her little tin box is nearby. She can feel it, calling to her. You locked me away and never looked at me again, it says. Burned everything but me.

It’s in the rafters. She hid it there when she was fresh and new and believed in the Forge. Or thought she believed, because – refusing to burn it was an act of rebellion wasn’t it? Small, but present, even then. You can’t take everything from me. I kept this, for all those years, safe even in the face of worse than this. 

Was she, even then, trying to keep some essential part of herself protected?

She clambers up, stiffer and clumsier now than she used to be, finds her box still there. She drops down to the floor before she opens it up.

She knows what’s in it, but she needs to see, anyway. The knowledge is faded and crumbled in her mind.

“Oh,” she says, soft, after the hinges creak and the box is open. “Oh.”  
Inside, exactly what she was expecting, but still somehow unexpected. The little square of blue knitted fabric, moth-eaten and trailing yarn ends. The cheap, broken locket with nothing inside. A single bullet casing. A strange, hand-made charm of bones twined round with metal wire and animal-gut string. The cord it hung on long broken and lost.

She touches a trembling finger to these things and remembers.


	4. 4

It’s nothing she didn’t already know, but now all of it fits in with the life she ran to.

 

*  
Teacher told her, all along, told her open and straight. “You name a thing,” his foggy form said in her memory, “You name a thing, you shape it. You own a little bit of it forever. When you’re grown, you take your own name.”

*

But they died before she could. Died from coughing, as she remembers it. Her mind tells her there were other survivors, but what did that matter when it ended the same? Her, alone, unnamed, set to survive without help?

*

She forgot. Or – didn’t forget. Put it away. Because what did it matter, the way she had been supposed to live, if there was no-one left to give her guidance? Became tangled up, rough, feral. Trod the line between survivor and killer, crossed over it before she even grew herself tits. Sharptoothed thing, girl full of broken glass and thick, rancid bitterness. A scream locked in skin. 

*

When she met Slag, she turned herself over, belly-up, instinctive in the face of a bigger predator and worse monster than she’d ever achieved. He gave her a hand. He told her she was special, powerful. That everyone else was weak, and they deserved what she dealt to them because of it

She passed all his trials and laughed even as her skin shrank from the fire.

He burned her past and gave her a name, and she should have remembered what that would mean.

*

When you name a thing, you shape it. You own a little bit of it forever.

*

“He owns me,” she says to the things in her box, the few things he never took from her. “He owns me, even now.”

Somehow she staggers to her feet, though there is no blood or bone in them at all. How can there be, when she’s a ghost? He owns her, and he is dead. Isn’t the part of her he owns dead too?

It all makes a kind of awful sense. She is dead. She has been dead from the moment she let him name her.

She goes, step by memorised step to the Forge proper, where he used to hold court, gather his favourites, sacrifice the weak and small and scared. She pushes open that door, expecting the rush of heat and light that comes. She doesn’t get it.

The Forge, for the first time ever, is dark and cold. There is no sign anywhere of Slag’s body. She doesn’t even have his corpse to hurt.

Part of her brain expected this to end with him here, and her able at last to kill him and take back all those years where she had been his, vicious and willing. That somehow his blood on her hands would scrub all the rest off, undo everything.

But instead it’s just a grey room and emptiness, and a tin box clasped tight in sweaty hands.

“Fuck,” she says. “I need to get out of here.”

She staggers blind, through the door, out the upper exit, onto the wire gantries and walkways. Rusted, damaged but holding up fine. Built to bear the weight of time and weather. The air is fresh, here. A light breeze blows her hair out of her face. Here, there’s nothing but the sky, the Commonwealth stretching out in bleak peacefulness, the birdsong sweet and fragile.

Her legs are weak. Her knees won’t hold her, so she goes down onto her ass. When did she get so flimsy, so fragile, that some old memories could hit her like a bullet?

She has been a killer, a murderer, a torturer. She’s done the worst things a person can do.

So why, why, why does she feel so – so –

There are footsteps, thud and creak, and she whips her head round hard enough to make her neck regret it, thinking for a brief awful second that she’ll see him, alive after all, come to claim back what was always his.

But it’s just Glory, walking cautiously, as if Fahrenheit is an injured Deathclaw. As if Fahrenheit might hurt her. Hurt Glory. No. No, no, never never never.

“I’m sorry,” Fahrenheit says, and the thick pain in her throat makes her voice come out strange. Her heart is pounding. She might be dying. Wouldn’t that be fitting? To die here, where she caused so much pain? 

“You’re having a panic attack,” says Glory. And it doesn’t – it doesn’t? “Have you had one before?”

“I – what? I –“

“I’ve had em. Lots of them, once. Listen to me. Focus on my voice.”

Nothing makes sense and everything is awful, and Glory is the only solid thing, a safe space in the wildfire, so Fahrenheit reaches for it.

“I need you to breathe. Slow, Fahrenheit. In for five, out for seven. Come on.”

It helps, a little. The fog clears, her heart rate slows. She no longer feels it in her temples, throat. 

“Sometimes it helped me to kinda, imagine the bad feelings were a kind of colour, and think like I was breathing that out. It might work for you.”

It’s poison, it’s poison. Sickly green and sticky-liquid, it falls out of her when she breathes.

“There we go,” says Glory after a while. “There we go.”

“What’s wrong with me?” Now that it’s gone, the fear seems so ridiculous, so unnecessary. 

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Like I said, I’ve had a bunch of these. Sometimes everything is so shit it just overwhelms you, and your body thinks it’s dying.”

Fahrenheit looks down at her hands. “I always just used to find someone to hit or kill when things were shit, before.”

Glory sits down beside her. “Yeah, but you’re trying to be better now. Can’t do that any more. Unless it’s a bad guy.”

“Why – I mean I don’t –“

Glory chuckles. “Fuck, Fahrenheit, I don’t know why. I got some ideas, based on what you’ve told me, but I’m not a head doctor. All I can think is you’ve got some shit piled up in that pretty skull” – she taps one long finger against Fahrenheit’s temple- “that needs cleaning out.”

Fahrenheit turns to face her, and they make eye contact. Dark brown eyes to blue-green. Glory’s finger stutters, goes soft against Fahrenheit’s skin. Slowly, very slowly, her hand uncurls until the palm is cradling Fahrenheit’s face.

“I. Uh,” she says. She licks her lips, once, twice. “I talked to some people about mine. It’s OK, it’s –“

Fahrenheit leans forward. Her heart is beating. The world is spinning. All she wants is something good.

“Glory,” she says. 

And she kisses her, hard, on Glory’s beautiful full mouth.

It’s awkward at first, two people fitting together imperfectly, but then Glory is grabbing at her, strong arms round her back, and her mouth is open against Fahrenheit’s. 

Glory pulls back first. She looks dazed. Her mouth is wet.

“I,” she says. “I want.”

“Yeah,” says Fahrenheit, cause it would be nice, to have something to wash this day clean for her. “Me too.”

Glory kisses her again, desperate and hard, and when she pulls back there’s a glitter in her eyes and her jaw clenches.

“I’m not in the business of tiptoeing round what I want,” she says.

Fahrenheit wants to say that she isn’t, either, but it wouldn’t be exactly true. A drink or a fight or a quick fuck, sure, she’ll reach out with both hands. Anything else is harder.

And Glory is square in the ‘else’ category.

Instead of responding she holds out one rough hand to Glory, who takes it in the two of hers, and squeezes.

“And you,” says Glory. She shakes her head, smiles. “You make me want you so much. “

“I’ve wanted you ever since the very first day I saw you,” says Fahrenheit, because she’s helpless not to. 

Glory actually groans at this. 

“Fucks sake. What I’m getting at here, is I don’t want to be another thing you do to hurt yourself. I deserve better than that. I want nothing more to go over to the Slog, rent their biggest private room, and fuck you til you can’t breathe any more, but I don’t want you avoiding my eyes and not talking to me any more after because you regret it.”

“Why would I do a thing like that?”

Glory’s smile is kind and sad. “I dunno, cause you just got hit hard by your past, had a panic attack, and immediately started kissing me?” She rubs her thumb against Fahrenheit’s palm in tiny, gentle circles.

“Yeah, probably not the best time. Shoulda kissed you in that house last night.” Fahrenheit smiles at her. “I feel like I’ve been punched in the head and heart and gut about thirty times, but I’ve been thinking of kissing you this whole trip, so. Thinking of more than kissing, too.”

Glory makes a small, wounded noise.

“If we fuck, I want –“ she says, swallows, tries again. “If we both have a good time I’d like for it to be a thing we repeat.” She makes eye contact with Fahrenheit. “I like you,” she says, with heartbreaking, straightforward honesty. “I’d be keen to see if it could be more than like.”

Fahrenheit could be flying with how she feels right now. This fucking day. This fucking week. 

“Yeah,” she says, mouth dry.

Glory nods, decision made, life potentially altered for both of them in a few sentences. And she smiles again – grins, really, happy and filthy and promising.

“Let’s get back to the Slog, huh? I believe I have a desire to fulfil.”


	5. 5

The Slog looks different to when she was an active Forged. Then it was small, quiet. Just ghouls farming their tarberries and shit. She’d been in the guard once or twice when they came to collect their protection money and she remembered a lot of scared people, pushing anger down under to where it’d do no harm.

It’s bigger now. There’s a bar, built out of scrap wood and metal. It’s got a sign outside, clumsy handwriting reading ‘beds 4 rent, 20 caps. Private rooms 50.’

She wonders when, after she left, it got so that people would rent a bed here. But then, it looks like traders come here now, and travellers stop by.

Inside the bar, a Minuteman flag hangs proud above where the barmaid serves. She’s a woman more than three quarters of her way to Ghoulification. Her skin has started to slough off, her hair is in patches. She gives them a broken-toothed smile.

Glory looks at Fahrenheit.

“Private room, please,” she says, and the ghoul woman flicks a look from Glory to Fahrenheit and grins, all knowing.

“Sure thing.” Her voice is heading towards the ghoul rasp. 

Glory slides 50 bottlecaps across the scarred wood. They glint under the light, dents catching the glow and throwing it back in strange directions.

“Up the stairs and to your left.”

The room is small. Just one bed, a little cabinet, a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. A radio is playing Diamond City Radio, Travis blathering about something to do with a machine. Fahrenheit isn’t really listening, and Glory just pulls a face and turns it off anyway, so it doesn’t matter. And then they’re standing in the little, airless room, in silence, looking at each other.

The silence isn’t an oppressive, difficult one. It’s a silence with possibility, potential. A future is uncurling, unfurling, ready to be born. Fahrenheit ruins it by yawning.

Glory laughs. 

“I’m sorry. Today was tiring for you,” she says. “Go on. I’ll sit watch.”

“There’s not even a chair to sit in,” says Fahrenheit, voice already distant and thick with tiredness.

“I’ll sit on the bed. If that’s, um, Ok with you.”

“Sure.” Fahrenheit strips off the outer layers of her armour. Under it she’s wearing a long-sleeved top and some shorts that stink of sweat and dirt, are stained under the arms, creased at the curve of her waist and hip. Dirty can wait, creased clothes can wait. She really is very tired.

She slips into the lumpy bed, punches the straw pillow a few times.

“I’m not sure this room is worth fifty caps you know,” she says, voice slurring, eyes closed.

“No,” says Glory, soft. The bed shifts when she sits down and Fahrenheit is already half into sleep.

She dreams of fire, burning out of control. She dreams of being able, at last, to douse it, turn it into embers, warm and safe.

*

When she wakes, Glory is still there. She’s taken off her outer armour at some point, and is wearing a loose grey tank top and a pair of black leggings.

“Um. Morning, I think.”

The Slog is silent, the kind of deep and blanketing quiet that comes with the earliest hours of the day.

“Hey,” she says, and smiles.

Glory hesitates a second before leaning across to press a close-mouthed kiss to Fahrenheit’s cheek. She grins at herself when she pulls away.

“Hmm,” says Fahrenheit. “Could you do another of those, but on my mouth this time?”

So Glory does, and it’s sweet.

Glory rests her forehead against Fahrenheit’s. “I’ve got to head on to my job tomorrow,” she says. “It’s not safe for you to come.”

Fahrenheit runs one hand down Glory’s face. 

“I’ll wait here, shall I?”

“You don’t have to.”

Fahrenheit shrugs. “Want to.”

They kiss again, and this time Glory takes Fahrenheit’s face in her hands and kisses her hard, deep and wanting. Fahrenheit breaks from it a little breathless, knowing she’s blushing because of the heat in her cheeks and ears.

“Hey,” she says. “I know I just passed out on you last night, but you still want to – what was it? ‘fuck me til I can’t breathe’?”

In response, Glory kisses her again, and this kiss has intent. Fahrenheit slides her hand under the loose top, feels hot skin over fat and muscle and bone. She stops her hand just under the modest swell of Glory’s breast, tracing fingertips over the vulnerable, delicate skin there. 

Glory stops kissing, moves to growl into Fahrenheit’s ear. “Oh, you’re a tease, huh?”

Glory tugs off Fahrenheit’s top, revealing her scarred torso, her low-hanging breasts. She traces one finger down the burn scars, almost reverent.

“Look at you,” she says. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve thought about seeing you naked?”

“Hope it doesn’t, uh, disappoint.”

Glory cups Fahrenheit’s breasts in her hands, kisses at the stretchmarks. “Never,” she breathes against the skin. “Never, never.”

Fahrenheit runs a hand over the stubble on the shaven side of Glory’s head. She’s already getting wet, nipples hardening. She wants, she wants, she wants. To touch, to kiss, to taste.

She drags Glory up to face her and kisses hard. They undress each other the rest of the way until they are both naked. All flaws on display, two people with pasts that left scars and injuries behind. Glory is narrow but muscular, small-breasted. Her nipples are almost purple, her pubic hair coarse but sparse. Fahrenheit loves it, finds it the most beautiful thing in the world. She runs a hand up one hairy calf, nibbles at Glory’s broad, hard waist, leaves wet trails of kisses along the velvet skin.

In her turn, Glory is very aware of every scar, every bit of Fahrenheit that healed strange and aches on cold mornings, and kisses each of them in turn, making Fahrenheit’s body sing, her mind spin. They are facing each other, entangled, skin against skin, but no friction against where she wants it. She bucks her hips helplessly, trying to grind her clit against Glory’s thigh, but it’s not – it’s not-

“Fuck, come on,” she says, because her cunt is aching, soaking, wanting, “touch me, please –“

“Touch you?” Glory’s gone red, her pupils dilated. “Like this?” She tweaks a nipple, sharp enough for a spark of good pain to go through Fahrenheit. 

“Fu-u-uck,” Fahrenheit breathes. She grabs Glory’s hand and moves it down between her own legs. “Do you not feel how wet I am for you?”

“Oh, oh,” says Glory. She presses an open mouth against Fahrenheit’s neck. Her fingers move against Fahrenheit’s wet pussy lips, slide up to the clit to make gentle circles around it. Fahrenheit gasps, groans loud, jerks her hips forward. Glory’s hands are so hot, so hot. Up close, like this, she smells, she smells – good, so good. Not like flowers or spice, but like warm skin and leather and metal, and the sweet-sour musk of arousal.

Glory shifts them so that she’s on top of Fahrenheit, somehow keeps her hand against Fahrenheit’s cunt. She supports her weight on one elbow so she can look down on Fahrenheit’s face. Fahrenheit looks up at her, squirming, wriggling at the building pleasure. Glory grins. She cants her hips forward, rubbing her clit against Fahrenheit’s bare, thickly-muscled thigh. The slick of it, dragging against her skin makes Fahrenheit gasp.

Glory is muttering, broken praise falling from her mouth. 

“So wet, so beautiful,” she says, before squeezing her eyes closed.

Fahrenheit looks up at her face, all scrunched up with want and sex, eyes shut tight. Sweat gleaming in the dull yellow of the bare bulb

Glory’s fingers move faster, faster, rubbing hard and brisk, just this edge of too much. 

“I want – I want –“ Fahrenheit gasps out, words hard to reach, body settling down into the rhythm of pleasure, animal call and response. 

Glory slows, opens her eyes. They’re glazed in the light. “What do you want? What – oh, what do you want?”

“Mouth,” says Fahrenheit, voice too close to a whine to her taste. “Your mouth, god, been thinking of it –“

She has, too, long nights while Hancock slept off his high, fingers pressed hard against her own clit, picturing Glory’s mouth slick and working on it instead.

Glory makes a noise like she’s been punched and says “Hey, hey, how’d you feel about doing mine at the same time?”

And Fahrenheit says “What?” and then “Oh, sure,” when her sex-stupid brain grasps onto what Glory is suggesting.

A break for some rearranging. Bodies can be such awkward things, legs and knees and elbows everywhere. But they manage it, settling down with Fahrenheit’s head propped up on pillows, Glory on hands and knees above her, delicious wet slit right at eye level. Fahrenheit touches it with index and middle finger, delights in the shudder that goes through Glory. Delights, too, in the thick, sharp smell of her, the way her pubes are soaked through.

Glory shuffles her body down, gentle, careful not to hurt or crush Fahrenheit, and then they’re at the right angle, finally. Fahrenheit starts them off, with a gentle kiss to Glory’s labia, following it up with a long, wet lick from hole to clit. 

Glory bites off a noise before she starts to return the favour, tongue against lips and slit and hole and bud, wonderful wet heat and precise stimulation. Fahrenheit loses herself in the taste and smell of Glory, in the feel of Glory eating her out, in the rough joy of it all. The room disappears, the splintered walls, the too-small bed, the single lightbulb swinging. Everything is down to its most essential, everything is just this, their two bodies, orgasm approaching her fast, a cliffedge at her feet, a fire burning in her.

She comes so hard that her vision whites out behind her eyes. Glory is gasping above her, clearly not there quite yet and when Fahrenheit can move again she starts licking once more with renewed focus, til Glory comes all foul-mouthed and harsh-voiced and her mouth floods with sweet-tinny wetness and she lets her head fall back on the pillow, mouth thick, brain blissfully clean and empty.

“Holy shit,” she manages after a break.

Glory shuffles off her, slumps down beside her, still beautifully naked, sweat drying on her limbs and belly. “Yeah,” she says right back. “Holy shit.”

Tongue loosened, Fahrenheit says “You got any idea how long I’ve been wanting that?”

“I might,” says Glory. “First time I ever saw you, I took one look and thought ‘I’d like to see that girls tits’.”

Fahrenheit laughs, hits Glory with the uncomfortable pillow. Glory grabs it, throws it to land the opposite side of the room, and well, of course Fahrenheit has no choice but to use Glory as a pillow.

“This is nice,” she says, drifting off. “Almost no-one’s been so nice to me before.”

*

In the morning Glory goes off to her job, fully dressed. They share a knowing, secretive smile, and Fahrenheit says nothing about come back safe, because it’s not needed. Glory will always be safe. The world will fall down at the nuclear blast she is.

But Fahrenheit stays anyway, swapping to the ten cap beds because what’s the use of a private room if there’s no-one to fuck in it? She’s used to sharing anyway, from childhood to Saugus to Goodneighbor, she’s had someone snoring in a bed two foot from her more often than she’s ever slept alone.

She waits three days. Four. It’s coming to five and despite herself, the worry is eating away, chewing its way through gut and bone. 

But on the fifth day Glory comes back, limping and covered all over in blood that proves, after Fahrenheit strips her to be sure , not her own

“You waited,” say Glory after the reunion.

“Sure,” says Fahrenheit. “Said I would.”

Glory rolls over to face her, eyes gleaming and says “When we get back to Goodneighbor, I’m gonna take you out for a drink. Get to know you proper.”

“I’d like that.”

“This might be tough, you know. My job. It’s unpredictable, there’s no guarantee I’ll –“

“Hey,” says Fahrenheit, and kisses her. “It’s worth trying, either way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and there we are. Comments make me happy. If this fic turned you on to the Right And True Path of Glory/Fahrenheit, come talk to me on tumblr at bisexualpiratequeen

**Author's Note:**

> My wonderful artist is Lingering in Lowtown. Check them out here!
> 
> http://antivanonmytongue.tumblr.com/


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